“If you grow a healthy tree, you’ll pick healthy fruit. If you grow a diseased tree, you’ll pick worm-eaten fruit. The fruit tells you about the tree. You have minds like a snakepit! How do you suppose what you say is worth anything when you are so foul- minded? It’s your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words. A good person produces good deeds and words season after season. An evil person is a blight on the orchard. Let me tell you something: Every one of these careless words is going to come back to haunt you. There will be a time of Reckoning. Words are powerful; take them seriously. Words can be your salvation. Words can also be your damnation.” THE MESSAGEThis past summer was a hard one for persons to do all they should to keep their plants healthy. Now cooler weather has come, the rains have helped, but the plants reflect the neglect from the lack of rain and feeding. Our desire is to grow healthy plants, and we know they need water as well as specific plant food designed for the plant. In Matthew the implication is that we (the tree) need to grow in such a way to produce fruit. Matthew tells us that a good person produces good deeds and words. How do we become this good person? Matthew would have us to recognize that all parts of our life-our selves, our family, our work, our community are all completed in Jesus, and thru him we produce good fruits.
How many times have you heard a person say to you that they have “burn-out”? Whether it’s a project they once threw their passion into, or a marriage that at one time was happy, they now seem uninterested or lost. Lacking the Holy Spirit, or even worse rejecting the Holy Spirit we may be cutting off a part of the tree that could otherwise be fruitful.
Matthew goes on to warn us about our careless words. OUCH! How many times I have flipped off a comment without thinking. How many times did it hurt someone? Words are powerful and can’t be taken back. We are bombarded with words, words, words every day, maybe we should take them more seriously.
In the WIZARD OF OZ it is the tin man who looks for a heart. As he walks the yellow brick road, he is singing “If I only had a heart” Matthew knew the importance of “having a heart” that we might see God’s creation complete in all parts of our lives, in our work, our family, and our community. It’s our heart that gives meaning to life.
Marilyn Holleron
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